An affordable option for building a cheap home library, 20th-century hardcover publishers book series included reprints of classics and publisher’s back catalog titles as well as newly commissioned titles. A few series dominated, such as Everyman’s Library and the Modern Library, but there are many others. These pages document the diversity of 20th-century reprint book series. Click on a series below for more information about the series.

Library of World’s Greatest Books

The Willey Book Co. was a New York publisher and dealer in remainders, overstock books, unbound books and printing plates who published at least one other series, the Comedie d’Amour Series. The Willey version of this series was a reprint, ca. 1935, printed from plates used in the original series, published by Societe Des Beaux-Arts around 1905-1910.

The Library of World’s Greatest Books series falls into a grey area: it is a series of classic reprints, but the series name appears nowhere on the books or jackets. Instead, the series name comes from an advertisement on the jacket from the Comedie d’Amour Series.It is not completely clear if the series “name” is actually just a statement about the classic titles Willey was publishing at the time. There does not seem to be any mention of the series anywhere (internet resources search) but on the jacket. Titles in the “series” include:

The Republic of Plato, by JewettPhilosophy of History, by HegelInterpretation of History, by NordauSchopenhauer’s EssaysThe Divine Comedy, by DanteAge of Reason, by PaineHebrew Literature, by WilsonImprovement of the Understanding, by De SpinozaOmar Khayyam, by FitzgeraldCritique of Pure Reason, by KantPlato-Aristotle, by JewettThe Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, by BaconThe Federalist, by Hamilton

It’s not clear that these titles were published together as a single earlier series, but at least some of the copies include earlier copyrights to other publishers, suggesting that Willey had collected together plates for various “classic” titles and published them together in the 1930s.

Jackets are unique to each title in the series. This copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason is dated 1942. As noted above, the series name is not on the jacket nor in the book itself. The front jacket flap includes a price of $1.25 after a description of the book.

The book’s description continues on the rear jacket flap. The back flap lists additional similar titles, under “Willey Books” with a brief description of each and a price. Several are not included in the listing under the Library of World’s Greatest Books name on the Comedie d’Amour Series jacket:

Basic Writings of Thomas JeffersonSacred Books of the East

The books are bound in cloth, red in this case, with basic black typography: